So, the day before school started  was Labor Day. I had not done anything as far as arithmetic was concerned. So my father sat me down on a chair and made out flash cards for the times-tables. He told me to sit there until I learned them all and could say them all to him. Times one to times twelve. First I sat there and messed around. Then I realized that he meant business and I wasn’t going to be able to leave there until I learned them. So, I learned all of them in one sitting.

That kept me in good stead the rest of my life because I learned that I can pretty much learn anything if I set my mind to it.. That was hard for someone that age because I was only eight years old.

A similar thing happened when I was in high school. I went to three different high schools. My freshman year was at Colombia Falls High School in Colombia Falls, Montana. In those days, all of the freshman girls had to take home economics.

Then we moved to Crescent Lake, Oregon and I went to Gilchrist High school in Gilchrist Oregon from September to December. It was a very small school. In fact, we ruined the little school  at Crescent Lake because my father moved there before we did so that I could finish out my freshman year and my brother could finish out his senior year at Colombia Falls. He found out that there was no schooling beyond the seventh grade in Crescent Lake.

So, he found Gilchrist and he told the school district that they had to send a bus because I needed to get to school. So they did and they said anybody who lived in Crescent Lake and wanted to come  to Gilchrist could come. So some of the other parents sent their kids and it completely ruined the little school that was there. There was a wonderful teacher who taught first through seventh grade. This was a one-room school.

The building was also the community gathering place. The teacher lived upstairs.  I was in high school and we all had to go at the same time on one bus. It was thirty miles each way. The poor little first grade kids had to stay all day long and take the bus. It was a long, long day for them. We knew that we were going to be leaving in December and there was not enough left to keep that school going the next year. They let the teacher go and it was very sad.

I was in this teeny, little high school at Gilchrist.  I had to take home ec II. My father asked if I could take geometry. But, no only the boys got to take geometry in their sophomore year. My father said that I would be leaving, but they still said no. So I took home ec. I was taking biology there, but it was a really rinky-dink class. It was more of an ecology class.

Then we moved to Redmond, Oregon. When I got there and in  the biology class, they had been studying the phylums and all of that  and I didn’t know anything.  I started school there the first of January and they were on the semester system so they had finals at the end of January. Well, the final in biology was on all of the phylums, of which I knew zero. So, I learned them all. And I got the best test grade in the whole class. I knew that I could do it because I had learned the multiplication tables way back when.